Insta-Inspiration: Editor's Letter January 2014

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Condé Nast Traveler Editor in Chief Pilar Guzmán encourages everyone to make this New Year’s resolution: Ask yourself where you want to go in the world, and then take steps toward planning that trip.

WHILE YOU’RE RENEWING YOUR VOWS to eat more kale and less bread in this season of post-holiday penance, we’re suggesting that you make another kind of New Year’s resolution: Simply ask yourself where you want to go in the world, and then take steps toward planning that trip. Sounds easy enough, but chances are it’s been a while since you’ve given a globe the proverbial spin and thought beyond business travel or set annual vacations that are perhaps governed less by discovery and more by room availability during high season. Whether it’s a road trip to the Adirondacks or a ten- day safari, the point is to seek something out consciously—and we don’t mean the all-inclusive package you passively agreed to because you ceded the family reunion planning to your taskier sister. In Travel Resolutions, we asked 11 of our favorite travelers where they want to go this year in hopes that we might inspire you. In some cases, their choices were driven by a desire to explore their ancestral history, in others by a longing for clean air and quiet. You can always find a good reason not to go on a trip, but you will never ever regret having gone.

Matt Hranek

Editor in Chief, Pilar Guzmán

Many of us become so paralyzed in the planning—we often put too much pressure on a trip to meet everyone’s needs—that we end up running out of time and options. In Water Worlds, we give six of the most gorgeous bodies of water enough breathing space to transport you just by looking at them. Whether at a cliffside infinity pool in Ubud or an outdoor mineral bath in a lunar landscape near Reykjavík, the prospect of weightlessness (with or without drink in hand) is sometimes reason enough to book a trip. And in the annals of unspoiled gems, Tunisia, with its Roman ruins, seaside villages, nuanced Mediterranean cuisine, and sense of political and economic possibility, bears the imprint of numerous occupying cultures and civilizations over thousands of years—Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Islamic, and French, to name a few. (While at press time, the U.S. State Department still had a travel warning in place for Tunisia, security experts in the region consider it one of the safest Arab Spring countries.)

At Condé Nast Traveler, we believe that passport stamps and miles logged in the air and on the ground are key metrics to a life well lived. And so we hope this is- sue gets you on your computer in search of cheap flights...or at least sends you down the rabbit hole of some of our favorite bloggers and Instagrammers, whose pictures of near and far-flung locales alike have launched at least a dozen trips among us.